Our Vision - What the MCF is trying to do:

The MCF is empowering children of the mountains to make positive changes in their lives and communities by providing a forum from which they can speak and be heard, access resources and take action. We believe that lasting change and development in the mountain communities—which have long been isolated and beset by social malaise such as alcoholism, migration and unemployment—will be enhanced by tapping the energy and idealism of the children. It is not so much a project as a revolution in how the people—especially the young people—of the mountains perceive themselves and how they address the problems in their communities.

Through the MCF we hope to:

• Encourage the children to take an active part in identifying problems and finding solutions within their communities.
• Link children together so they can share their vision and ideas with each other and discuss and find solutions to their problems.
• Create a forum through which the children of the mountains can communicate with the rest of the world.
• Spread awareness and information through the children to the entire community.
• Promote citizenship and equity in mountain communities and help children become proud of their mountains and their culture. Help make children the ambassadors of the mountains equipped with the knowledge of how to participate in local and global affairs.
• Protect mountain ecosystems by making the children and their communities active stakeholders in their preservation.
• Help the children find and acquire resources to enable them to achieve the goals they have set for themselves.
• Prevent migration (and the resulting breakup of families) by improving opportunities and living conditions in the mountains.
• Build links between the children, their communities, and government institutions, thereby improving governance in the region. The children can also be a valuable resource for the government in providing accountability and monitoring how government programs are actually implemented on the ground, thus ensuring long-term solutions.
• Enable the children of the MCF to feed into larger movements, such as the Global Movement for Children.
• Discourage the hypocritical face of development that is too often perfunctory and rushed.

Why Mountains, Why Children:

For too long mountains have existed at the peripheries of people's minds: One in 12 people (some 700 million, 245 million of whom are in rural areas and developing countries) live in the mountains (FAO, 2002). Yet mountain communities around the world—from the Andes to the Himalayas, the Appalachia to the highlands of Ethiopia—have long been marginalized, mired in poverty, and isolated from opportunity and choices, resources and services. There is often a common thread among the problems faced by people in mountain communities and should be addressed with mountain-specific strategies according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Children, too often, are also marginalized and have little say in the policies and decisions that impact every aspect of their lives. But they are also resource users and will grow up to comprise the community and its leaders. And of all the segments of a community, it is the children who have the greatest energy and drive to change and improve their worlds. Their parents, too, are most open to new ideas and willing to try new things if they believe it will benefit the children. The organizations behind the MCF have a long history of development work in mountain communities, and our experiences have only made us more certain that to bring about real and lasting change in these regions we must engage the energy and optimism of the children. The UN has declared that anyone under the age of 18 is a child (no matter how adult the burdens and responsibilities they bear) and it our conviction that we owe them the chance to speak out for themselves, their peers and their communities and to undertake what they feel they should—and have demonstrated they can—do to make their lives and communities better.

During the International Conference of Mountain Children (ICMC) in May 2002, young people from the mountains of India and Nepal had the opportunity for the first time to share their experiences with each other. It soon became clear to them that mountain children have astonishingly similar lives, marred by a lack of opportunity and often devoid of even basic necessities, such as education, medical care, and even water. But something remarkable came out of this meeting—the children quickly moved beyond complaining about their problems and started discussing how they would address them. In the months since, many mountain children have made dramatic progress in taking intitiative and making a change in their lives and communities, ranging from engaging their local government, getting a new teacher for their schools, cleaning up their villages and raising awareness of health and hygiene in their villages. (For more detailed descriptions of what the children have been doing, please see our Activities and MCF Chapters sections.)

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How the MCF works:

The MCF is currently powered by a loose network of organizations that are working with children in the mountains and at last have begun to believe that children are the best, most effective agents of change and development. It is not a single project, or program, but rather a questioning of the way the world perceives and works with children. Ultimately, as the children become more accustomed to assuming leadership roles in their communities, we believe the MCF will evolve into a broad-based, self-sustaining movement (a way of life) where the children and their communities identify and start to address their problems, institutions such as government and development agencies turn first to the children's groups when developing and implementing their programs, and the children's groups themselves are able to reach out to each other and the outside world for help and resources.

Though it is still in its infancy, we envision the MCF as a vibrant forum that bridges the cultural, technological, physical, and linguistic barriers that separate mountain communities throughout the world; a place where young people lead the discussions, mindful of not just their rights but also their responsibilities, and move beyond declarations and rhetoric to bring about real and positive changes. The first two years of the MCF have been more than encouraging in this regard.

Ultimately, the Forum will make its home primarily in cyberspace. But until the Internet is easily accessible to people in the remotest mountain communities, we will continue to work at the grassroots level using all the available methods of communication—from radio to newsletters to meetings and workshops—to bring young people together and give them a platform to share and voice their opinions.

What the Mountain Children's Forum can do is limited only by the imagination of the young people. If you have ideas, please share them with us at mcfglobal@vsnl.net.